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Rach Cosker-Rowland, Moral Error Theory, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 70, Issue 278, January 2020, Pages 218–220, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqz026
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According to moral error theorists, moral talk is like talk about witches. Moral talk commits us to particular normative properties just as witch talk commits us to the existence of people with supernatural abilities. And just as there are no such supernatural abilities there are none of these normative properties. In his thorough, lucid, rich, and valuable book Wouter Kalf investigates how we should understand the error theory, what the best arguments for it are, and what we should do if we come to accept it.
In the first half of the book Kalf asks: What are the particular normative properties that moral talk commits us to? How does it commit us to these properties? And why should we be skeptical of them?
Kalf (p. 101) argues that moral talk commits us to the claim that there are categorical moral reasons of rationality where a categorical reason is one that applies to and binds you whatever you want. We seem to have categorical reasons not to assault others for we have reason not to assault others regardless of whether we want to or not. But we have no categorical reasons to drink whisky, that is, reasons to drink it regardless of whether we like it; we only have hypothetical reasons to drink it if we want to. Here Kalf differs from Jonas Olson and Bart Streumer who in their recent books argue that moral talk commits us to the existence of irreducibly normative moral reasons. Irreducibly normative reasons are reasons that cannot be analysed in terms of non-normative facts such as facts about the desires we have or the practices of our societies. Kalf argues that Olson and Streumer's view cannot explain how moral reasons get a grip on agents, that is, why we necessarily should care about morality. Kalf (p. 105) asks, ‘what if the world had contained irreducibly normative reasons that tell me to disfigure my body?’ If it did, these reasons would not seem to matter or have a grip on us. But it seems that our moral talk commits us to reasons that necessarily do have a grip on us; reasons that we are rationally committed to following the dictates of.
